Wednesday, December 31, 2014

The 2014 Maps of the Year is my choice of the best 100 interactive digital maps released this year. It was a hard selection to make and I left off many great maps (and ended up with a final list of 116 maps).

You can filter the list by map provider. A few of the maps use more than one map library, for example they might use Mapbox for the map tiles and Leaflet,js for the display. Unfortunately the template I created for the list only allows me to add one tag to each map. Where more than one mapping library has been used I've had to make an arbitrary choice for which tag to use.

The 2014 Maps of the Year doesn't appear to work on Internet Explorer. Try Chrome or Firefox instead!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

In general I'm not a huge fan of cartograms. The distortion of an area on a map by the size of the data usually just ends up confusing my simple brain. However I do like this animated cartogram showing US Population Trends Over The Last 220 Years.

This map shows the size the population in every U.S. state for every decade since 1790. As the animated cartogram plays you can clearly see the general migration westward over the centuries in the United States.

Another neat visualization of the westward migration in the U.S. is this map from the US Census Bureau. This animated map shows where the
mean center of the population has been for each U.S. census from 1790 to
2010.

The North West Bushwick Community Group is a local organization fighting for housing justice in Bushwick, New York. In particular the community group is engaged in trying to ensure that development in the area is focused on local community needs before those of private capital.

As part of the fight for housing justice in the neighborhood the group has created the Northwest Bushwick Community Map. The map includes a number of data layers relevant to housing and housing need in Northwest Bushwick. These include information on land use, rent stabilization and the owners of individual properties.

The map uses Odyssey,js to also present three different stories which provide real world examples of how the data layers relate to the housing and community needs of residents in Bushwick. These three narratives explore the impact of gentrification in the neighborhood, specifically involving the Rheingold Development, Colony 1209 and 98 Linden Street.

Hervé Saint-Amand has created a series of Housing Price Maps for a number of major cities. The maps show the relative cost of residential properties across each of five different major European cities and Montreal in Canada.

Using the maps it is possible to get a quick overview of the most expensive and the cheapest places to buy a property in Sofia, Edinburgh, Montreal, Moscow, Amsterdam and Prague. The About page of Housing Price Maps provides an overview of the data and methodology used to create the heat maps.

Monday, December 29, 2014

It has been another successful year for CartoDB's temporal mapping Torque library. Even as 2014 begins to wind down the Torque maps still keep coming.

Yesterday AirAsia flight QZ8501 vanished from radar screens over the Java Sea. This AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501 map plots the flight path of the plane from Surabaya to Singapore. The map uses the Torque library to animate the flight of the plane from Surabaya to its last known position, when it lost contact with air traffic control at 06.24 local time.

The Torque library has also been used by the to-do list app Wunderlist for their annual productivity report. The World Productivity List uses the library to visualize where and how the application is used throughout the world over the course of one day.

Torque is often used to show a lot of flashing data on a world map. The Wunderlist maps, like many of these maps, hardly reveals any interesting geographical patterns in the underlying data. However I guess the map succeeds in its main task of demonstrating that Wunderlist has lots of users around the world.

There's certainly still time to listen to a few more Christmas carols with this Smithsonian Folkways Holiday Music Map. The map is bursting with traditional holiday music, featuring songs from the collection of the museum's Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

The map includes 56 songs from 24 nations. Songs which celebrate the winter holidays, whether that be Christmas, Chanukah, or Kwanzaa. Using the map you can listen to an Icelandic version of 'Silent Night', 'O Tannenbaum' from Germany, Psalm 150 sung by the Jewish Abayudaya congregation in Uganda or traditional songs from numerous other communities around the world.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Turf is a JavaScript library which allows digital maps to implement many common GIS functions. Using Turf digital maps can perform geospatial processing
tasks with GeoJSON data. Turf connects to Leaflet, and is also now available as a Mapbox.js plugin.

The map shows the nearest London police station to a certain point. The queried location is pre-determined in this map but it should be a simple task to make the marker of the queried location draggable. Turf can process the geospatial query in the browser so it should be simple to allow users to query the map to find the nearest police station to any location.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Thanks to the power of GPS (the Gnome Positioning System) Google are able to track Santa's movements on Christmas Eve. The Google Santa Tracker shows Santa's progress around the globe as he delivers presents to the world's children.

At the time of writing Google is heading towards Wanganui. So, if you live in New Zealand, you should stop reading this and go to bed. So far Santa has delivered over 11 million presents. Way to go Santa!

This year the NORAD Santa Tracker is using Bing Maps to track Santa's progress. You can use the map to view Santa's current position on top of a satellite view of the Earth.

After Santa has visited a country a marker is added to the map. You can click on the visited country's marker to learn a little more about the country via its Wikipedia entry.

This year you can also follow Santa live on planefinder.net. Santa's sleigh has the flight number of S4NTA2014.

The planefinder.net Santa Tracker has the added bonus of showing Santa's track. This means you can not only view Santa's current position on the map but you can also see where he has already delivered presents.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

The Jiepang Check-in map visualizes check-ins made on China's leading social network on 24th October 2012.

Jiepang is often called the Foursquare of China. As China's leading location based service it allows users to share their location data with friends and also to check-in to venues. The Jiepang Check-in map shows check-ins made on Jiepang in Beijing on one day.

The colors of the circles on the map represent the category of venue (dining, shopping, night-life etc). I assume the size of the circles represent the number of check-ins made at each venue.

Last week I was very impressed with Our Town Stories - Edinburgh. Much of the appeal of Our
Town is that you can view vintage photos of the Scottish capital overlaid on historical maps of the city.

Helsinki Ennen is another collection of beautiful historical maps and photographs, this time for the Finnish capital. A time-line runs along the bottom of the map. Select a decade from the time-line and you can view vintage photographs of Helsinki from that decade overlaid on a map dating from the era.

Many of the photographs are also displayed side-by-side with the same view as it is seen today, using Google Maps Street View. This allows you to see how the city has changed over the course of the Twentieth Century.

Monday, December 22, 2014

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has for the first time released population in a 1 km² grid format. The data represents the Usual Resident Population (URP) from the 2011 Census of Population and Housing.

The 2011 Australian census has also been used to create some other interesting interactive maps. Australia's Special Broadcasting Service, a multilingual broadcasting
service for ethnic communities, has used the census data to map the top three birthplaces of
immigrants in suburbs and towns across Australia.

Where Australia's Immigrants Were Born
uses the Mapbox mapping platform to visualize the
countries of births of Australian immigrants. The article actually
contains a series of maps, one showing the country as a whole, a number
of maps covering the major cities and another map of the whole country
which excludes immigrants from England and New Zealand.

The Sydney Morning Herald also used the census data to create an interesting mapped analysis of
the languages spoken in the city. The map shows the top non-English
languages spoken in each of the city's suburbs, the density of English
as a first language and the linguistic diversity in each neighbourhood.

Sydney's Melting Pot of Language
reveals that east Asians predominantly live in the north shore while
Arabic speakers dominate the western suburbs. Over 250 different
languages are spoken in the city and nearly 40 percent speak a
non-English language as their first tongue.

Accompanying the mapped visualization is a bar graph showing the numbers
of speakers of each of the non-English languages spoken in the city.
The graph groups the languages into global regions but you can select
any of the region bars to view a percentage breakdown of the individual
languages.

This year Chris Whong created an impressive interactive map from New York Taxi Data. Chris' map has made it on to most Maps of the Year lists that I've seen in the last couple of weeks and it has also gone on to inspire a number of other maps using the same data.

The latest map of New York taxi journeys is NYC Taxi Map 2013. This one is an impressive example of using Google Maps with Google Cloud Dataflow. Using Cloud Dataflow the map geo-fences the taxi data by New York neighborhoods. The result is that you can click on an area on the map to find out the distribution of drop-off locations, the average fare, average tip
percentage and average number of passengers of trips that started in
each New York neighborhood.

Chris Whong's original map, NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is a MapBox visualization of the journey of one New York taxi over the course of 24 hours. You can also view the NYC Taxi Holiday Visualization, which animates taxi journeys from New York's airports over the course of a month and half, and Hubcab, a mapped visualization of 170 million taxi trips over one year in New York.

How would you like a personal visit from the Snowman? Chocolate company Thorntons have created a
magical online Christmas Card featuring Raymond Briggs' cute Snowman
character (and Google Maps).

The Thorntons Facebook Christmas Message
application allows you to send an animated Christmas message to a
friend in which the Snowman flies over their house (using Google Maps
satellite imagery) and even walks down their street (using Street View).

If you want a less commercial Street View message then you can use It's a Message. This Google Maps application
helps you create and send a personal holiday greeting from your own
choice of Street View.

Once
you select a Street View location and add your own personal message
this app creates a stylized Street View scene, with animated snow and your
greeting. The app pans and zooms around your chosen Street View
accompanied by some nice soothing Christmas related music.

Once
you are happy with your personal Christmas Street View scene you can
send the URL link to your friends. This app uses WebGL, so you will need
to use a compliant web browser.

Tech companies have invented the modern Christmas tradition of the Santa Tracking interactive map. Between now and Christmas Eve you can visit Google's Santa Tracker webpage and play a different Santa related game every day.

The Google Santa Tracker also includes a Google Map looking at Christmas Traditions around the world. It is always fascinating to explore how different cultures celebrate Christmas. For example did you know that n Iceland the Christmas Cat prowls the streets at Christmas gobbling up anyone who is not dressed-up in clothes warm enough to ward off the winter cold.

If you are interested in learning more about Christmas traditions in different cultures you should also have a look at the Santas Around the World map. Santa goes by many different names. In many countries he is of course Saint Nicholas, but he is also known as Father Christmas, Agios Vasilis, Shengdan Laoren and Ded Moroz.

It seems that there are two main versions of Santa's name. In many countries Santa is named after Saint Nicholas, for example 'Santa Claus' itself derives from the Dutch 'Sinterklaas', a dialectal pronunciation of Saint Nicholas. In many other countries he goes by the name of Father Christmas, for example he is 'Père Noël' in France, 'Pai Natal' in Portugal and 'Papa Noel' in Spain.

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Edinburgh Library has created a wonderful map featuring historical stories, photos and maps about life in the Scottish capital.

Our Town Stories - Edinburgh
is a great showcase for some of Edinburgh Library's collection of
historical documents, photographs and maps. My favorite aspect of Our
Town is that you can view historical photos of the city actually
overlaid on your choice of historical maps of the city.

The map includes a handy time-line feature which allows you to search
through the stories, photos and maps by date. Enter a date range on the
time-line and all the documents for that period are shown on the map
using categorized markers.

The Washington Post has published an interesting account of the escape
of three detainees from Alcatraz in June 1962. No one knows if the three
prisoners survived their attempted escape or died while trying to
navigate the strong currents of the San Francisco Bay,

The Washington Post's report, The Alcatraz Escapees Could have Survived,
is based on the work of Dutch researchers who have been working on a
model which simulates the movement of particles and detritus in bays.
Based on this model the Dutch researchers have concluded that the three
Alcatraz prisoners may have survived, but only if they left the island
at the right time.

The report includes two animated CartoDB maps, one showing the worst
case scenario and one showing the best case scenario. Both maps use
tidal records to model the water-flow in the San Francisco Bay on the
evening of the escape.

As the animation plays out on both maps you can view the likely track of
the escapees based on the different times during the evening when they
could have left Alcatraz. The animated boats on the map are colored to
show the time of escape. In the best case scenario, as long as the
escapees left before 1 a.m. and paddled north, they may have made it to
the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge and freedom.

One of the most popular posts on Maps Mania in 2014 looked at the heat
maps generated by joggers and cyclists using wearable technology. One of
these maps was Mapbox's '1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides',
created using data from Runkeeper users.

Mapbox has now updated that map to include 150,000 additional routes and
higher levels of zoom. Mapbox was able to achieve this extra detail by
using Tippecanoe, a library developed by Eric Fischer for making vector tiles from large data sets. You might remember Eric's 6 Billion Tweets Map, from earliest this month, which also made great use of Tippecanoe.

The Superpowered 1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides map overlays Runkeeper routes on top of a Mapbox powered map of the world. The map
includes some quick links to jump to the maps of a few major cities
around the world and you can also pan and zoom the map to view the popular
running routes at any location in the world.

Bloomberg has released an interesting interactive visualization of climate change using a WebGL 3d globe (which I think was created using Three.js). Climate Change in Perspective uses the 3d globe to examine the shrinking of the polar ice caps, the rise in sea levels and the rise in carbon emissions.

Bloomberg's WebGL 3d globe is used in a number of impressive ways to visualize these climate change topics. The globe is used in conjunction with a time-line to show the loss of the polar ice caps over time. CO2 emissions are overlaid on top of the globe to animate the flow of emissions around the world over the course of one year. You can also zoom in on specific locations on the globe to view a number of photographs illustrating some of the climate change issues being exploredd in the Bloomberg visualization.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Teleport is an interesting real-estate search engine for the Bay Area. Tell Teleport where you work, how far you wish to commute and how much you wish to pay for housing and it will recommend the best areas for you to live in the Bay Area.

At the heart of Teleport is your preferred commute time. Enter a commute time into Teleport and your mode of travel and you will be shown a heat map of recommend areas within reach of your workplace. The areas marked in green are the best matches for your search.

You can add a number of other filters to your search. These include Food & Nightlife, Outdoor Recreation, Sports, Safety, Schools and Internet Access.

Clicking one of the recommended areas on the map brings up a comprehensive neighborhood guide. The guide to each neighborhood provides a wealth of information about the area, including reviews of local bars and restaurants, employment opportunities, work spaces and safety.

The map that has made it on to every Maps of the Year post is Chris Whong's NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life. MapLab call the map 'strangely mesmerizing'. Cartonerd says that the map is "a lovely piece of work that works well, marries form and function and shows us what web mapping can be".

As the day's journeys plays out on the map the taxi's position is shown by a yellow circle
map marker. All the passenger journeys are added to the map with a blue
polyline. The map also keeps a running total
of the cab's total number of passengers, fares and tips received.

Once you have viewed a day in the life of this New York taxi you can
choose from another one of thirty cab journeys mapped over 24 hours.

Friday, December 19, 2014

Over the last few years Maps Mania has featured a few maps from San Francisco's Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. These include the Ellis Act Evictions Map, an animated timeline map of Ellis Act evictions, the Ellis Acts Against Seniors and People With Disabilities map, which visualizes the number of seniors and disabled tenants evicted over the last 3 years, and the No Fault Evictions
map, showing the location of all no-fault evictions filed between January
1997 and October 14, 2013.

The Anti-Evictions Mapping Project has now released a map of Killings by Law Enforcement in Oakland. This map shows the locations where 90 people have been killed by the Oakland Police Department, the California Highway Patrol, and the BART Police in Oakland since 1970.

The markers on the map indicate the race of each victim. The Anti-Evictions Mapping Project were able to identify the race of 78 of the victims. Of those 78 victims 99% of them were people of color.

One of the most popular posts on Maps Mania in 2014 looked at the heat maps generated by joggers and cyclists using wearable technology. One of these maps was Mapbox's '1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides', created using data from Runkeeper users.

Mapbox has now updated that map to include 150,000 additional routes and higher levels of zoom. Mapbox were able to achieve this extra detail by using Tippecanoe, a library developed by Eric Fischer for making vector tiles from large data sets. You might remember Eric's 6 Billion Tweets Map, from earliest this month, which also made great use of Tippecanoe.

The Superpowered 1.5 Million Walks, Runs, and Bike Rides map overlays Runkeeper routes on top of a Mapbox powered map of the world. The map
includes some quick links to jump to the maps of a few major cities
around the world and you can also pan and zoom the map to view the popular
running routes at any location in the world.

If you zoom in on the map you can view the recorded tracks right down to sidewalk level. Zooming down to sidewalk level allows you to observe the inaccuracies in the GPS data. There are lots of tracks where people seem to be running through buildings or on top of rivers. However, despite the inaccurate data, roads and sidewalks still emerge from the data due to the huge number of tracks being mapped.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

NOAA has released an interactive map of the Earth's vegetation. The Green Vegetation map was created using data from the VIIRS sensor aboard the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite.

The dark greenest areas on the map are the locations with the lushest vegetation. The map uses a pale color for the Earth's oceans. I'm guessing this is because if 75% of the planet was colored blue this would detract from the vegetation being highlighted on the map.

You can read more about the vegetation data and how the map was created on the NOAA website.

Google has immortalized the set of The Colbert Report on Street View. Comedy Central will air the last episode of the show tonight and presumably the studio set will soon be no more. Thanks to Google Maps you can now take a little tour of the studio set using Google's panoramic imagery.

Of course this isn't the first time that Google Street View has ventured inside a television studio. Fans of Dr Who can take a walk around the Tardis on Google Maps. If you are a fan of Harry Potter then you can also take a stroll down Diagon Alley on Street View.

I've just found the perfect spot for taking a photo of the sunset on the Winter Solstice. Using Stonehenge in Your City I've found a path in the Olympic Park in London which is directly aligned with the Olympic Stadium. At 3.53 p.m. this Sunday, weather permitting, I should be able to take the perfect photograph of the sun setting behind the Olympic Stadium.

If you want to take your own perfect sunset or sunrise photo this Winter Solstice (or Summer Solstice if you live in the southern hemisphere) then have a look at Stonehenge in Your City. The site has maps of hundreds of cities around the world showing streets which are aligned with the sunset or sunrise on the Winter and Summer Solstices.

If you want to find out the perfect time to take a photo on this solstice then have a look at the Golden Hour Calculator. The Golden Hour Calculator
is a Google Map that displays sunrise and sunset times, the elevation
and azimuth of the sun and shows users when the golden hour occurs for
any location.

The Golden Hour Calculator defines the 'golden hour' as "the first and
last hour of sunlight in the day when the special quality of light
yields particularly beautiful photographs". Using the calculator
photographers can enter the location where they are planning to take
photos and the calculator will display a graph beneath the map showing
when the golden hour occurs.

Users can change the date of their shoot to ensure that the calculator displays the correct times for the golden hour on a given date.

OpenAddresses is a free and open collection of postal address data around the world. Currently OpenAddresses has a lot of address data in the USA, Japan, Belgium, Australia and Denmark, with patchy coverage elsewhere.

Open Addresses has visualized the current coverage of address data worldwide on a Mapbox created map. This dot map of open addresses represents each open address in the collection as a white dot. This allows you to zoom in on town and cities to see if open addresses are available to download at your location.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

This week I've been spending a bit of time going through the back catalog of Maps Mania hunting out my Best Maps of 2014. I thought it might be interesting to also have a quick look at the most popular stories on Maps Mania in 2014.

This year only one subject could beat Pokemon and that was A Game of Thrones. The huge popularity of George Martin's series of fantasy novels and the HBO television series seems to be reflected in the popularity for Westeros maps. This little round-up of A Game of Thrones related maps got the most traffic on Maps Mania in 2014.

Google Map's annual April Fool joke never fails in driving huge traffic to Maps Mania. This year was no different. The fact that Google this year made their April Fool's map into a fun challenge probably ensured that this seemed to be Google's most popular April Fool's joke yet.

3. Where the World Runs
Strava, Runkeeper and Nike all created some great maps this year. This little round-up of jogging & cycling heat-maps seemed to prove popular with Maps Mania readers. It also contained some great looking maps.

Over the last couple of years I've become increasingly frustrated by the very slow pace of development of the Google Maps API. In January I finally vented my spleen. It seems I'm not the only one getting frustrated at the Google Maps API Development team, at least judging by the traffic that this post generated.

5. Building the World Cup on Street View
Wow! One of my own maps made it to the top 5. I'm not really sure why. This post looked at how you can hack Google's historic Street View imagery. I guess it was the use of the World Cup in the title that generated most of the traffic.

Unfortunately it looks like my hack has run into some gremlins and some of the historic Street Views seem to have gone missing (my hack depends on using the PanoID for each Street View - which is always dangerous because Google often change the ID's).

6. The London Bike Video Map
Cylodeo's idea of providing cycling directions with video previews is pretty inspired. The launch of new coverage in London this year seemed to attract the attention of Maps Mania readers.

Real-time maps always seem to be popular on Maps Mania. It looks like pairing a real-time map with the World's greatest cycle race is a guaranteed winner.

I'm stopping there! A list of seven seems a bit arbitrary (a listicle of 10 would probably get more traffic) however these seven posts got far more traffic than any other post on Maps Mania this year. The eight, nine and ten posts on my traffic list got less than 50% of The 2014 Tour de France Live Tracking post. So this seems like the natural cutting-off point.

I'm not sure I can draw any conclusions from the most popular stories on Maps Mania. Although it does seem that sports related maps (& cycling in particular) do generate a lot of traffic.

Edinburgh Library has created a wonderful map featuring historical stories, photos and maps about life in the Scottish capital.

Our Town Stories - Edinburgh is a great showcase for some of Edinburgh Library's collection of historical documents, photographs and maps. My favorite aspect of Our Town is that you can view historical photos of the city actually overlaid on your choice of historical maps of the city.

The map includes a handy time-line feature which allows you to search through the stories, photos and maps by date. Enter a date range on the time-line and all the documents for that period are shown on the map using categorized markers.

If you select a 'history map' marker you can view the map overlaid on top of the Google Map base layer. You can then select an 'image' marker to view the historical image and the location that it depicts.

If you select a 'story' marker a story map opens. The story map guides you through an historical event from Edinburgh's past highlighting all the relevant locations on a Google Map. For example, the 'Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh' story recounts the author's life in Edinburgh, featuring family portraits and historical photos, and a mapped guide to some of the Edinburgh locations important in his life.

Diane Rabreau is your personal Google Maps search assistant. If you ever come across anything strange on Google Maps or want to know more about a certain location - just ask Diane. She will visit the location in person and report back on what she finds.

Diane visited the fjord and discovered that the scratches are actually tubes holding nets for catching mussels. Like all Diane's answers that isn't all Gino got. Diane also takes pictures and videos on her visits and interviews local people and, if necessary, contacts experts to explain what she finds.

So, if you ever find something strange on Google Map's satellite view, contact Diane and she just might visit the location and report back on what she saw
and experienced.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

It's that Maps of the Year time again. Each December I look back and celebrate some of my favorite interactive maps of the year. This year I've split my annual round-up into two parts. Maps of the Year - Part One covers the months of January through June, with the last six months of the year to come before the New Year.

The Maps of the Year doesn't appear to work on Internet Explorer. Try Chrome or Firefox instead!

This year you can filter my round-up by map provider. This is really handy for anyone who wants to find great examples of maps by specific mapping libraries. However, regrettably, it does mean I've had to leave out two or three maps which weren't made with one of the main mapping API's.

If you are a fan of great maps you should also check-out Cartonerd's Favorite Maps of the Year. As well as highlighting some of his favorite maps Kenneth Field has picked out some of the mapping trends and movements that he has spotted in cartography over the last year. With his usual honesty Kenneth is not afraid to highlight some of the mapping trends and map reporting which he finds not as useful or informative.

Some of the maps I've chosen would probably never make it into a Cartonerd round-up. However, whether you love them or hate them, I hope you have as much fun exploring them as I had in compiling this list of the Maps Mania's Maps of the Year (Part One).

The Washington Post has published an interesting account of the escape of three detainees from Alcatraz in June 1962. No one knows if the three prisoners survived their escape attempt or died while trying to navigate the strong currents of the San Francisco Bay,

The Washington Post's report, The Alcatraz Escapees Could have Survived, is based on the work of Dutch researchers who have been working on a model which simulates the movement of particles and detritus in bays. Based on this model the Dutch researchers have concluded that the three Alcatraz prisoners may have survived, but only if they left the island at the right time.

The report includes two animated CartoDB maps, one showing the worst case scenario and one showing the best case scenario. Both maps use tidal records to model the water-flow in the San Francisco Bay on the evening of the escape.

As the animation plays out on both maps you can view the likely track of the escapees based on the different times during the evening when they could have left Alcatraz. The animated boats on the map are colored to show the time of escape. In the best case scenario, as long as the escapees left before 1 a.m. and paddled north, they may have made it to the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge and freedom.

OSM Buildings is a JavaScript library for visualizing OpenStreetMaps building geometry on interactive maps. Thanks to a new demo map using Mapbox GL you can explore OSM Bulidings from a completely new perspective.

One of many great features in Mapbox GL is the Mapbox GL rotate event. Using the rotate event in Mapbox GL allows you to change the orientation of a map. In the new OSM Buildings GL Preview this means you can rotate the map and view the 3d buildings from all angles.

On this page you can view images of the Tate Modern in London with the map orientated to the south and to the north. When using the OSM Buildings GL Preview map you need to right-click on the map to start rotating the map and left-click to turn off rotation.